A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 59 Posts
  • 1.72K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

    I’m not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I’ve gone back, I’ve definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less “mainstream” platforms though.



  • Yea, the point of any thing like this would be to provide a better grip on what’s going on with these phrases and to break down the opacity of their coming from another language.

    The thing with latin though is that it isn’t quite an alien language to english speakers … so many components of it have ended up in language that an english speaker can kind of “triangulate” some of it.

    The “ad” in “ad hoc”, for instance. It’s the same “ad” in “advance” or “addition” “admit”. And “hoc” is related to English “here”. It literally means “toward this (thing)”, which takes on the meaning “for the purpose of this thing” … that is, being “for a specific thing”, not “general purpose”.


  • Seems to miss some big ones and providing understanding of them.

    “Et cetera”

    • “and other things”
    • abbreviated to “etc”
    • not pronounced “excetera” … but honestly I wouldn’t worry about it because this is the sort of alteration the Romans would have made and did make, and language is always evolving.
    • IMO, basically a distinct English word now

    “Exempli gratia”

    • “for the sake of an example” / “for example”
    • abbreviated “eg”
    • basically a distinct English word now in the abbreviated form, pronounced “ee gee”.
    • easily substituted with a plain English translation “for example”

    “Id est”

    • “that is”
    • abbreviated “ie”
    • like the above, basically a distinct English word now, IMO.
    • easily substituted with its plain English equivalent: “that is”
      • especially given how close the Latin is to the English …. Notice how similar the two phrases sound … that’s not a coincidence, these languages are related after all.




  • Actually, I think you’re spreading some false-hoods here.

    I’ve spoken to the core-devs about this here, and they acknowledged that being able to follow people/users would be a generally good idea, but felt that it was a lot of work and so not a priority at the moment.

    I’m with you on the desire of a platform the fuses the two general mechanisms (groups and users), and I think a groups-first platform like lemmy can bring something valuable to how a user’s feed would work … but the reality is that this sort of thing is just not in the fediverse’s DNA at the moment. These aren’t for-profit companies that need to wheel out features constantly to keep their stock price up!

    There’s an exception to that though … friendica, hubzilla and streams, the sort of alternative timeline or “ancient magic” for the fediverse that predates ActivityPub and mastodon by long margins. They have clunky UIs, but are quite feature full, and happily combine both groups and users.



  • maegul@lemmy.mltovegan@lemmy.worldOld, but we all have to learn these.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    Yea interesting. It really is the beef v cow thing entrenched directly in the culture.

    I wonder if, in anglo-phonic culture, it has roots back to the french-aristocratic v anglo-serf divide in Norman England. Looking to the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany as comparisons could be illuminating. I’ve certainly heard stories from non-anglo people about relatives raising, slaughtering and eating their own animals, but never anglo.


  • maegul@lemmy.mltovegan@lemmy.worldOld, but we all have to learn these.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 days ago

    Yea, well it tracks with the deferred ethics of the whole dynamic/system.

    My favourite was the opening, which set the tone and had me double take to make sure I read it correctly: “You can slice someone’s throat and still love them.” Of course you can, so long as you respect them and remain mindful of the circle of life.

    I don’t engage in any vegan arguments at the moment … but I’d imagine the real razor would be whether anyone has actually killed the kind of animals they’re eating and would be happy to do that every time they ate (the corresponding amount of meat, just to be “fair”). I have, through scientific research seen and participated in animal killing, and watched how others digest the process. I’m pretty most moderately thoughtful people would not be up for it at all.





  • they drive away potential allies because the concept of harm reduction is anathema to their binary thinking. If you’re not ALL in, you’re the enemy.

    I can resonate with that. But I come back to … “it’s totally ok for people to create their own spaces, especially on federated social media and especially for minority groups/ideas”.

    There are likely plenty of other spaces for “potential allies” to engage and talk about veganism if they want to, or plenty they, or you, could make on their own.

    Tacitly admitting that vegans are usually antisocial zealots. “It’s right in the name!”

    Well, they’re running their own social media platform, so I’m not sure how anti-social they are.





  • I suspect the basilisk reveals more about how the human mind is inclined to think up of heaven and hell scenarios.

    Some combination of consciousness leading to more imagination than we know what to do with and more awareness than we’re ready to grapple with. And so there are these meme “attractors” where imagination, idealism, dread and motivation all converge to make some basic vibe of a thought irresistible.

    Otherwise, just because I’m not on top of this … the whole thing is premised on the idea that we’re likely to be consciousnesses in a simulation? And then there’s the fear that our consciousnesses, now, will be extracted in the future somehow?

    1. That’s a massive stretch on the point about our consciousness being extracted into the future somehow. Sounds like pure metaphysical fantasy wrapped in singularity tech-bro.
    2. If there are simulated consciousnesses, it is all fair game TBH. There’d be plenty of awful stuff happening. The basilisk seems like just a way to encapsulate the fact in something catchy.

    At this point, doesn’t the whole collapse completely into a scary fairy tale you’d tell tech-bro children? Seriously, I don’t get it?



  • Every browser released since 2020 supports this

    It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

    You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

    Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.